Rural substations offer you their owners a diverse kind of challenge. Even though they would benefit from substation automation, it seems the cost outweighs the returned obtain.
These substations generally have little within the way of Distance Relay Power, and they contain some old equipment that was never created with IEDs or any variety of sensor in mind, but that is certainly specifically what exactly is taking place. As technologies advances, the price tag on the components goes down, producing systems affordable. Just appear at memory for computer systems.
Cellular coverage also has elevated for the point that really handful of regions are without access. Telemetric (Boise, Idaho, U.S.) is making modest rural substations smarter with its wireless communications systems. Telemetric delivers an end-to-end system consisting of 3 primary components: intelligent remote Current Differential Relay Protection; Telemetric's PowerVista, a network management computer software application; and the AT&T nationwide cellular network. Sensors are added to selected substation equipment, and cellular communications connects the substation to the utility.
The technique can be integrated to any SCADA program via a DNP3.0 interface called SCADA-Xchange. The intelligent field devices allow the utility to view the status of equipment, initiate changes and automate selected events to trigger a control action to take place in the substation. "It is limited information, but these stations do not require full SCADA systems," noted Tom Loutzenheiser, Telemetric's CEO. "Over 200 utilities in North America have installed Telemetric's systems on their systems." Buckeye Power Inc., a wholesale power supplier in Ohio, improved its system reliability with the deployment of roughly 330 Telemetric TVM3 voltage monitors. This system is created to detect and report delivery-point outages on its rural network. Buckeye personnel are notified by alarms and messaging sent via pagers, cell phones and e-mails. Operations personnel are responding more rapidly to events and are reducing customer outage times. Loutzenheiser reports that Nevada Energy (Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.) started an innovative capacitor automation project last year using cellular data communications equipment from Telemetric and Nari-Relays controls from QEI Inc. (Springfield, New Jersey, U.S.) on roughly 2200 capacitor banks.
When this project is completed, Nevada Energy will have two-way communications confirming all switching commands and capacitor bank status.